


Break the Mold

by polytropic



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: AKA, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Slavery, Body Horror, Canonical Child Abuse, F/F, Lewis Snart's A+ Parenting, Metahuman Iris West, Metahuman Lisa Snart
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-30 23:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8554276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: The League should be careful about giving people magic. Some of those people, namely Lisa "Goldmine" Snart and Iris "Huntress" West, know exactly what to do with their powers, and have just been waiting for a chance to strike.(Set in the League-of-Shadows-rules-the-world alternate timeline conceived of by nirejseki.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nirejseki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Highest Bidder](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7411174) by [nirejseki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki). 



> This is a birthday gift for nirejseki! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and I hope this does some level of justice to the awesome work it follows up on. The end notes said that "I fully expect Barry to lead a rebellion against the entire system one day" and, because I'm a perverse person, my brain immediately said: "Okay but what if Iris did instead."
> 
> Part one is complete and is Lisa's POV; part two is coming and will be from Iris' POV.
> 
> Warnings: This work uses imagery and themes of slavery and slave markets, mentions canon elements of child abuse from Lisa's past and will incorporate elements of child abuse in Iris' as well, and briefly discusses suicidal ideation. Let me know if I missed anything I should tag and warn for. 
> 
> Lastly...I did the thing again, friends. I named it after "All-Star" by Smash Mouth, specifically, the line that comes _after_ "all that glitters is gold". #notsorry #leonardsnartisproudofmeandthat'swhatmatters

Lisa sees the Hunters go out again from the window of her bedroom cell. She is, of course, privileged in the extreme to have such a window; the view looking out over the loading bay is prime real estate, and she's fielded plenty of envious glares for having snatched it. In fact, if you compared this room to the one she grew up in, she'd be hard-pressed to find anything to complain about: the bed is soft, the carpet is lush, and the little ensuite toilet has three kinds of conditioner because she may be a captive sorcerer and a slave but heaven forbid her hair not be shiny. 

She thinks sometimes that the Daedalus enjoys his little pageant of her as the princess in the tower far, far too much. Not, thankfully, in a sexual way from what she can tell, just in the way that powerful, twisted men like playing games. She's well familiar with that. 

Fulfilling her role as the maiden at the window--she can recognize a constructed narrative but that doesn't mean she won't play her part in it, at least as long as it gets her what she wants--Lisa presses her face to the glass and peers downwards, straining her neck to try to see better. She counts two full parties gearing up, which means...yes. The Huntress stride into view, mouth pressed tight and eyes grim as always. Lisa has been watching through this window for months, and she's never seen the woman smile. 

She's collected a lot of other facts about her, though. She is small for a Hunter, perhaps 5'3" and slim. When she rides out with her teams, her back stretches over the expanse of her hoverbike, and she grips the bars firmly but casually, experienced to the point of ease. Her dark leather gloves blend seamlessly into the arms of her thick jacket, but sometimes she tugs them off to check a piece of her equipment, and when she does her hands are fine-boned and skillful, the skin a slightly lighter warm brown than her smooth cheeks. She wears her hair in a braid wrapped around her head like a crown, and though Lisa knows that it must be a decision based on functionality, to keep her curls out of the way in a fight or when riding, it gives her a little shock of pleasure to see every time, because it is beautiful and she thinks perhaps the Huntress does not know that. 

Huntress ignores her team with studiously casual disregard. They are, for the most part, white men, burly and in their forties and fifties. Lisa wonders at the utterly confident way Huntress turns her back on them, gestures her orders with the full expectation that they will be obeyed. She is not a beloved leader (though Lisa does not understand how that is possibly the case): she garners scoffs and glares and rude comments aplenty, but her control is ironclad nonetheless. Lenny was like that, Lisa remembers. He commanded a room not because people liked him, but because they knew he was irreplaceable. 

The team is ready, and as Lisa watches, they kick their bikes into gear with snarls of noise that reach even her high window. The Huntress is the last to mount up, eyes scanning the courtyard once more carefully and then, just briefly, flicking up to the Tower windows. Lisa imagines that their eyes meet, but it's unlikely given the distance. On the other hand, she is predictable; who knows if by now the Huntress has clued in that whenever she leaves from this particular exit, she garners a watcher?

Lisa has been watching Iris West for four months now, ever since she saved Lisa's life.

~~~

For Lisa, it began when she made the utterly, unforgivably stupid mistake of letting her father discover that she intended to leave Central City. (Or perhaps it started almost five years before that, when her brother Lenny went into that Tower and never came back, snatched up by the Time Masters and vanished, as far as she could tell, from the face of the earth.) She'd reached her majority, had saved up enough cash by shoplifting and some judicious grifts, and she was almost ready to make her escape when her dad somehow learned she'd been seen trying to barter passage on a League coach out of town. She compounded that first massive mistake with a second one: she took the beating Lewis dished out with judicious groveling and some fake-slash-real tears, and hoped that would be the end of it. She didn't run.

The next morning her asshole dad delivered her to the Tower himself. He even asked if he could slap the activation cuffs on her personally. 

The Tower was a maze of shiny surfaces, booming magic voices, and terror. Lisa spent most of the day she sat in her horrible glass and metal cage thinking about how Lenny had probably handled it, how he must have examined every inch for a way out, watched the guards with slitted eyes looking for a weakness.

She also spent most of the day screaming through the glass. She's not Lenny. She can't take things slow and cold the way he could.

"Hey! Hey! Can anyone hear me??"

"Hey! You've made a mistake! I tested negative for the gene!"

"Hey! Heeeeeeeeey! I'm telling you, you've got the wrong person!"

She was banking on the testing negative thing buying her some time while they re-tested, but apparently her father had just faked her a positive result wholesale. It didn't much matter, the test had a 20% false negative rate anyways. Magic was powerful, but it couldn't predict everything, apparently. 

Despite her very best efforts--including flashing her tits at one of the guards who came to take her blood pressure, which she'd thought had a decent chance of success--Lisa didn't find a way out in time. She was cuffed again and hauled out into the sunlight, disorienting after almost a full day in the semi-dark of the cells. Eventually the buzzing in her ears resolved itself into the sounds of the crowd: a sea of buyers who, if she was  _ lucky _ , were only going to use her for whatever sorcery she developed instead of that and far worse tortures. She knew people said it was better just to die in the Process, but fuck that. If Lisa were inclined to listen to the "It'd be better just to die now" thoughts, she'd have offed herself when she learned Lenny wasn't coming home.

It did hurt a lot, though. The preview, where they turned on the Accelerator just briefly to give folks an idea of what they were bidding on, hurt like her nails being pulled out, like someone was reaching into her fingertips and yanking her little bones mercilessly. She shrieked, but it was drowned out instantly by the sudden roar of the crowd, and she had enough presence of mind to think,  _ oh no. I have something they want _ . 

The bidding started high and climbed dizzingly. The numbers made her head spin, though that might have been the very real possibility that she was going to throw up from pain and nerves. She was the only one on the block that day, so the crowd was quite thin, but it sounded like pretty much every Lord's house present was pulling out all the stops. What the hell had they seen, Lisa wondered to herself despairingly.

That despair turned sharply to shock when she heard, despite the bids still being shouted, the gavel come down. 

"Thank you for your bids. However, the League is going to require this sorceror for further testing; bidding is closed," the Daedalus, Wells, announced, and Lisa was shoved back into the Accelerator to the sound of disgusted boos from the crowd. 

The second time around, it hurt like poison in her veins, thick hot sludge bubbling through her and burning her as it went. She choked on it, or on her screams. She vomited, or she thought she did, but what came out instead was bright and shone like a sun. It splashed down in front of her and ran down the sides of the stage, and it was only when people below began to fight to get at it that she realized: it was gold. 

Lisa Snart dripped liquid gold from her fingers for a week after she survived her Process. She no longer bled red, but shining yellow (you didn't know indignity until you had to hand over the contents on your menstrual cup for processing into currency), and sometimes she felt it at the back of her throat once again, rising up and choking her like precious gorge. 

The people called her the Goldmine. Wells called her Rumpelstiltskin, a nonsense word which amused him greatly for no reason anyone else could see. The League called her their best asset, the most successful result of the Process since the Flash. Lisa, watching bright hot splatters of wealth fall with a flick of her fingers, called it pleasantly shiny.

~~~

Six months after being installed in the Tower, Lisa was kidnapped. It wasn't the first attempt by any means, but this time the Lord stupid enough to mess with the League was at least smart enough to hire help: a sorcerer who could teleport through walls. One moment Lisa was in her room trying to figure out how to make a continuous line of gold wire instead of just liquid (because the stupid collar shocked her if she didn't improve her powers adequately for the trainers) and the next there was a burst of blackness and she was outside the walls of the Tower in the arms of a woman about Lenny's age with dark hair and really nice purple lipstick. 

Lisa had one shining, bright moment of thinking,  _ I've been rescued _ , before the woman shoved her into the arms of a much shorter man, demanded "coins, now," and once a fistful of gold was dropped into her palm, disappeared.

"What--" was all Lisa managed to get out before the man grabbed her by the arm, very hard (Lewis-Snart-hard, in fact, and wasn't that a kick in the teeth to feel again) and plugged something into her suppressor collar. There was a whine of energy and then a horrible, crackling, searing pain, and Lisa's vision went dark as she screamed. 

She woke up slowly, cold and being jolted around. The muddled sensations of pain and whirling confusion eventually resolved themselves into a truly savage headache and the understanding that she was being transported somewhere in a carriage. That, Lisa reflected with a cracked smile that she suspected looked a little unhinged, was ironic: half a year ago she would have paid all her life's savings to be smuggled out of Central City, and now the term "life's savings" held next to no meaning for her and yet she was more wary of the price than ever. 

One didn't steal from the League without good reason. Whoever had taken her, they were both foolish and powerful. 

Carefully, she sat up and started to examine the carriage. Every jolt, and every slight motion of her neck, made her head throb fiercely, but she was going to make Lenny's ghost proud this time,  _ dammit _ , she was going to case the joint and break out just like he would've. The carriage was small and cramped, a single-seater, and well-appointed but not lavish. Her questing fingers found a crest stitched into the cushions eventually (if Lisa knew anything about Lords, it was that they couldn't resist splashing their name on literally everything that stayed still long enough), and with dedicated poking she deciphered the outline of it as the plumes and severe profile of a Roman helmet. Falcone. Gotham, then, which wasn't exactly good news because they were batshit crazy over there.

It took her an embarrassing five minutes of scrabbling around to realize what she should have immediately: her neck could move enough to hurt her head because she  _ wasn't wearing her suppression collar _ .

Oh, these guys were real dumb. Lisa spared three seconds to give thanks for every idiot in the world who didn't understand that liquid gold was molten, and then pressed her palms flat against the back wall of the carriage and spurted red-hot 1500°C metal straight at it. The wall melted, because chemistry.

Lisa had joyridden on the back of her share of passenger coaches in her days, as had all the kids from her block, so she knew exactly how to throw herself out of the side of the still-moving vehicle and roll when she hit the ground. Her head shrieked and heaved at the motion, but muscle memory won, and she was staggering to her feet by the time the cry of alarm went up behind her. They were in some kind of border of trees between two huge fields of tall green plants (look, Lisa was a city girl, okay?), and she took a deep breath, picked a direction, and ran.

They caught her almost three miles later, when the trees ran out. These crop-plants were too short to hide in, and before she could find a way back into the trees, where her smaller size and agility had been winning, she was surrounded. There were five men, a bigger party than she'd counted on, and she saw one of them readying activation cuffs from the corner of her eye.

Lisa pointed her hand at the closest man's face and tried, very hard, to convince herself to kill him. The most damage to another human being she had on her record at that point was when a guy in a tavern had gotten handsy and she'd driven the spike of her shoe straight through his foot (which she was still pretty proud of) but this was  _ it _ , it was now or never and she'd always said, hadn't she, that if she got the chance, if it was her or him, she'd do it. 

She looked right into his eyes, widening with the first glimmer of fear as he saw resolve in her gaze, imagined his face as Lewis Snart's familiar sneer, and shot.

He dodged. The gold hit his shoulder and arm instead of right between his eyes, and a scream ripped out of his throat, animal and gurgling and ugly. 

"Fuck!" one of the other men swore, but as she whirled to the next one, telling herself that she would, she would this time, even if the smell of burned flesh was turning her stomach she  _ would _ \--

Impact. Her head first, a starburst explosion, then her stomach into the ground, air bursting out of her lungs. Then her back, the stomp and grind of a boot.

It was such a familiar sequence that Lisa was honestly surprised when she didn't hear Lewis's voice. Instead it was an unfamiliar one, much deeper, and with more fear than she'd ever heard from her father. 

"Move and you die."

Fuck fuck fuck. Lisa spat a little splatter of gold dust onto the ground from a sluggishly bleeding lip, and tried to think.

"You can't kill me, your Lord wants me alive," she tried.

"We have two sets of orders, sweetheart. Bring you back alive if we can, but if not, your corpse is a good second best. If you're not churning out cash for us, then you don't get to do it for anyone else, either."

Ooh, that was  _ not _ what she wanted to hear.

"Let me go and I'll give you all enough gold to be set for life." 

"Changed your tune real quick, didn't you." The guy pressing her into the ground sounded amused, but behind him other voices were rising angrily. "--what she did to Tony--!" Lisa heard, and winced, but it was what came next that made her freeze up inside with horror:

"--don't have a suppressor collar."

_ Seriously? _ They'd destroyed her old collar of course, since it could be used to track her, but they didn't have another one? They'd been woefully misinformed, she realized: they'd thought her power was one that spit out convenient coins on command, with no offensive capabilities whatsoever. And now that they knew that she was a threat they had no defense against, there was no way she was getting to Gotham alive. 

"I'll come quietly--!" she started, the choice fairly clear if it was that or die, but it was too late. She heard a sigh above her, less regretful and more just annoyed. 

"There goes that bonus," he said. The rustle of a blade sliding out of a sheath sounded, slow but somehow implacable. Lisa bent her arm back until her elbow creaked at her and got ready for a really stupid, last-ditch attempt...and then there was a  _ very _ weird noise above her, kind of a wet 'thunk', and the weight on her back disappeared.

She raised her head from the dirt, her lip still slowly dribbling burnished yellow down her chin, and met wide, deep, beautiful brown eyes.

"Fan out and secure the perimeter," said an authoritative, high-pitched voice. Lissa watched as a young woman, no older than sixteen or seventeen, snapped out her wrist in a non-verbal command and behind her men stomped off at her bidding. "Suppressor collar," the girl demanded, and Lisa, catching on too slowly, barely had time to shove herself to her knees before the girl strode forward and snapped the thing around her neck.

It activated with a terribly familiar whine of static in Lisa's ears, and she felt her shoulders slump. She was alive, yes, but she was also caged again. It was, despite her firm position that surviving was always better than not, a disappointment.

Belatedly, she realized the thing next to her on the ground was her former assailant's corpse, an arrow through his neck. The fletching on the end of the weapon was in League colors, and Lisa finally put two and two together: these were the sorcerer-catchers, the famous Hounds, who could track and bring in anyone.

She hadn't realized their leader was so young, or so...she didn't know what, just,  _ something _ . The woman who'd saved her--caught her--rose to her feet beside her, and Lisa couldn't help it, she reached out and caught at the hem of her dark pants.

"Let me go." She knew it wasn't going to work, but she had to try. "You could say you found me dead. They killed me when I tried to run. Just one lie, for my life; please." 

She'd expected the woman to ignore her, or perhaps mock her. She definitely didn't expect her to close her eyes tightly, as if she was in pain, and then shake her head with a look like it was breaking her heart. 

"I have to deliver a body, alive or dead. I'm sorry."

"Say you lost me! I ran and you couldn't find me!" Lisa pressed, not sure why she was getting sympathy but desperately seizing it. 

Iris West's mouth quirked in a soft, sad smile. 

"That's impossible. I can find anyone."

~~~

The Huntress' kindness is a funny thing, Lisa has learned. It is nothing one would expect from a woman in her position (and what position is that exactly? Is she an agent of the League? Is she as much a prisoner as Lisa? Something in between? How long will Lisa have to watch before she knows?). It is not grudging, nor guilty, nor, as Lisa first thought, a facade. The best word she can find for it is 'uncompromising'. It was with uncompromising kindness that Iris West helped Lisa to her feet, gently wiped her cuts with a handkerchief with no apparent interest in the smears of gold that then marred the linen, and locked her wrists together into activation cuffs. She let Lisa ride in front of her on her bike, instead of slinging her over the back like a parcel, and though she rode through the night with no sign of weariness and without softening at her men's groans and whines, she silently handed over water and food without Lisa saying a word about thirst or hunger.

And when she delivered Lisa to Wells, his precious Goldmine back intact, Lisa saw the hate in her eyes. The Huntress looked at the Daedalus like Lisa used to look at her dad not when he was hurting her, but when he was hurting Lenny. 

That, more than anything else, drove Lisa back to her window again and again, every morning she heard there might be a hunt. A mystery to solve, a distraction from her own circumstances, an illogical fellow feeling...she'd dismiss it easily as all of those if anyone asked, but it's none of them.

Lisa Snart is not, in the end, a maiden in a tower. She watches Iris West because she saw, in the unexpected kindness and the pure boiling rage hidden behind flat obedience, the power that will bring this empire down. She wants to be there to see when it starts. 


End file.
